Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/505

Rh those in its employ, — its agents, servants, resident clerks, and winterers. These books cover the whole period of its existence, all its operations, and its controversies. Most commonly the employés of the Company were young men from Scotland and the Orkneys. They were sent out on covenants of apprenticeship or service for terms of years, on salaries, wages, and prospective rewards by promotion. As a rule they proved intelligent, capable, and honest; soon conforming themselves to the conditions around them, and occasionally reaping rich advantages in a fair way. Some of them developed a genius that could turn to account their hazardous and arduous kind of life, — which, however, at intervals became dismal and dreary. The books from their pens would be most interesting and healthfully exciting reading to our young persons who love to read of wild and adventurous life, especially when assured that the narrative is truthful.

The Company had in its service at one time about three thousand persons; and the hunters and trappers who supplied it roamed over a region of five million square miles. Of course this vast extent of operations involved complications of affairs, and jealousies and rivalries in the management of the Company, among its employés, and with French and afterwards with American fur-traders. It is not strange, therefore, that most of the books just referred to — written by the servants of the Company, and often in the dreary winter seclusion of its posts — contain free and not unfrequently severe strictures on its management. Its rapacity and greed in mere money-making, its partiality in distributing its favors, its indifference to the just complaints and grievances of its servants, and its utter neglect of the present and prospective welfare of the savages, whom it dealt with only with reference to their rich spoils, are strongly reflected upon. The Company, intrenched in its chartered monopoly, paid slight attention to these charges. The mercantile interest in England more than once brought about a